CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY
3.3 Validation and Evaluation procedures
The results of the prioritisation of eligible treatment patients based on IVSH2-FWZIC are tested and evaluated using three assessment processes. Two main procedures will be used to validate the results of FDMD methodology, namely, sensitivity analysis assessment and systematic analysis assessment. In Section 3.3.1, sensitivity analysis assessment will be used to investigate the effect of altering the weight values for 15 high-risk criteria on the ranking results across nine scenarios.
The second assessment will be explained in Section 3.3.2 will be used to examine whether or not eligible patients per DDM for each group are subjected to systematic ranking. However, in term of evaluation procedure methods of comparative analysis assessment will be applied between the FDMD and available MCDM is explained in section 3.3.3.
3.3.1 Procedure of Sensitivity analysis
Sensitivity analysis is one of validation assessment that would be applied in this study.Multicriteria models' results can be significantly influenced by the weights assigned to the different criteria.
Thus, examining the impact of changing the weights of the high-risk criteria on the proposed method's results is a reasonable step toward determining the method's robustness and the produced results. Therefore, this section of the study conducts the procedure of sensitivity analysis of patient ranks to changes in criteria weights that will be applied and the results will be presented in chapter 4. Sensitivity analysis begins with the identification of the most important criterion as determined by the IVSH2-FWZIC method. After that, Equation (18) was used to produce nine scenarios using the relative weights of criteria to investigate the impact of adjusting these weights Pamucar et al.
(2020). Moreover, the elasticity coefficient ( ) will be used to calculate the relative change of each criterion over the most essential one and the upper and lower bounds for adjusting the most important criterion weight were identified. Finally, the ranks produced by adjusting the criteria weights in the created scenarios were compared to the rank generated by the IVSH2-FWZIC.
(18)
Where is the most important criteria. is the weight values calculated by the IVSH2-FWZIC method. is the summation of weight generated by IVSH2-FWZIC. is the alterations range applied to the weights of the high-risk distribution criteria, which are the upper and lower bounds of the most important criteria. In addition, the Spearman correlation coefficient (SCC) will be used to perform a statistical analysis of the correlations between the nine scenarios and the rank results of IVSH2-FWZIC for the local machine. Results will be discussed in (Section 4.8.1).
3.3.2 Procedure of Systematic ranking assessment
In the second assessment (objective assessment), the prioritised patients at LM and CFS will be separated into different groups based on their prioritising sequence to assess the prioritisation results of patients who are eligible for treatment. Many researchers (Abdulkareem, Arbaiy, Zaidan, Zaidan, Albahri, Alsalem, & Salih, 2020; Abdulkareem et al., 2021; O. Albahri et al., 2021; Kalid et al., 2018; Khatari et al., 2021; Zughoul et al., 2021) have carried out similar assessment to evaluate their MCDM methods in the literature. The patient prioritisation results are validated by separating the patient into different groups and conducting a validation process. Each group
contained several patients. Within each group, the patients’ number varies according to the overall number of patients at the LM and CFS. Notably, (Abdulkareem, Arbaiy, Zaidan, Zaidan, Albahri, Alsalem, & Salih, 2020; K. Mohammed et al., 2020) indicated that the number of groups or patients used in the evaluation has no effect on the evaluation results. However, the last groups should have the greatest number of patients. The grouping of eligible patients for treatment can be validated in the following steps:
i. All weighted or normalised matrix are aggregated to produce a unified weighted or normalised matrix.
ii. The eligible treatment patients within the unified weighted or normalised matrix are ordered based on the prioritisation results.
iii. After sorting, the eligible patients for treatment were separated into three groups.
iv. Following that, the means are computed for each group to ensure that the patients were subject to a systematic order (Equation 19).
(19)
The comparisons were conducted based on the resulting mean of each group. The 1st group in the LM and CFS must receive the highest mean value to make sure that the ranking results were systematically ranked. The 2nd group's mean must then be equal or greater than to that of the 3rd group and equal or less than to that of the 1st group. The same strategy must be followed for the remaining groups, with each group having a mean value equal or greater than to that of the next
group but equal or less than to that of the previous group. The results of this assessment are presented in subsections for LM (Section 4.8.2.1 ) and CFS (Section 4.8.2.2).
3.3.3 Procedure of comparison analysis
In term of evaluation assessment, the robustness of the proposed methodology (FDMD) will be presented in section 4.3 in compared to the available MCDM method (T. J. Mohammed et al., 2021). The two main concerns of treatment distribution for patients with SARS-CoV-2 over hospitals networking will be discussed. These two main challenges will be used as benchmark checklist of achievement comparison from two aspects. First the application aspect in the medical field, more specific the available method or procedure in handling SARS-COV-2 treatment distribution issues over the hospital networking in compared to the proposed one (FDMD), and second the theoretical aspects, in term of the privacy and prioritisation challenges. The benchmarking check list will be presented in Table 4.10.